Since only a handful of the drawings at All Souls are signed and dated, it is necessary to preface the catalogue with a description of Wren's drawing style and office practice. The attributions given in the catalogue are based on the evidence set out here. The bold numbers in brackets refer to the catalogue entries.
Sir John Summerson was the first to draw attention to Wren's 'predilection for drawing and model-making' in his early scientific career. 'What we can see as a consistent bias in all his work', he argued, 'is the disposition to visual demonstration and the construction of working models.'[5] The account of Wren's youth given in Parentalia refers to numerous such drawings[6], and a handful of examples have come down to us at All Souls (382-383, 384-386, 390, 391). They reveal the extent to which his background in experimental philosophy provided a schooling in technical draughtsmanship and an aptitude for conveying information by diagram.
It was in the 1660s that Wren learned the specifics of architectural representation. In 1663 he produced his preliminary design for the Sheldonian Theatre (1–2), and by the middle of the decade he was drawing complex designs in plan, elevation, and section (9–13, 45–49). Two remarkable drawings from this period show him exploring ideas for buildings alongside unrelated scientific diagrams (384, 386). As he had no recourse to professional draughtsmen in the 1660s, his early drawings are inevitably autograph. In 1669 Wren became Surveyor-General of the King's Works, and for the next fifty years he presided over an office in London.
This was in reality several offices, administratively distinct but overlapping in terms of staff and physical setting. At its core was the Office of Works, which from 1669 provided Wren with a house, an office, and a staff. The office was located in the north-west corner of Middle Scotland Yard, and a 'Great' or 'Office' room, where most of the drawing was probably done, was located on the first floor[7]. The administrative organisation of the King's Works was little changed since the sixteenth century. It took no account of the revolution in architectural practice instigated by Inigo Jones, and it was assumed that the Surveyor-General and his staff would make their own drawings. Wren therefore trained a succession of draughtsmen who derived their income, as we shall see, from performing other duties. The architectural draughtsman had next to no status in late seventeenth-century England.
Wren's first decade in London was largely monopolised by his duties at St Paul's Cathedral and the City churches. In July 1669 he was 'unanimously chosen Surveyor Generall alsoe of the Repaires of the Cathedrall Church of St Paull'[8], in which role he was supported by an assistant surveyor, Edward Woodroofe, and a clerk of works, John Tillison. A small office was situated in the cathedral precincts[9]. The City churches were begun in May 1670[10]. Two 'assistants' were appointed to help him with the 'surveighs, Contracts, Accompts and Propositions'. The rebuilding of the churches was administered from Whitehall, and a clerk was appointed to oversee the day-to-day running of a small office. Other responsibilities came Wren's way in the ensuing decades. In 1682 he assumed responsibility for the design of Chelsea Hospital; in 1696 he was appointed Surveyor to Greenwich Hospital; and from 1699 he was 'Surveyor to the Fabric' at Westminster Abbey[11]. He also continued to supply designs for the universities, most significantly at Trinity College, Cambridge, c. 1675, and at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1681. In 1698 he informed the Master of St John's College, Cambridge, that 'nothing is more acceptable to me than to promote what in me lies any public Ornament, and more especially in the Universities'[12], and in 1701–03 he oversaw the restoration of the Divinity School in Oxford. Numerous other projects came his way over the years, including a more significant number of country house commissions than has hitherto been realised. Wren's architectural practice thus comprised many strands.
Drawings were produced in the office for two principal reasons: first, to generate and refine designs; and second, to communicate finished designs to others. Wren alluded to the first of these categories – the exploratory drawing – in a letter of November 1694:
Our English Artists are dull enough at Inventions, but when once a forreigne patterne is sett, they imitate soe well that commonly they exceed the originall. I confess the observation is generally true, but this shows that our Natives want not a Genius, but education in that which is the Foundation of all Mechanick Arts, a practice in designing or drawing.[13]
For Wren, then, 'drawing' was an essential element of 'invention', and the acts of 'designing or drawing' were indeed synonymous for him. His exploratory drawings take the form of freehand pencil sketches, normally executed on small pieces of inferior-quality paper. Most of the surviving examples date from the 1660s and 1670s (4–5, 19, 50, 266, 267, 270). The designs are tentatively expressed with a hesitant, discontinuous line. Much of the architectural detailing is omitted or summarised (column capitals, for example, are left blank), and related ideas are explored in the margins (and sometimes the back) of the sheet. Occasionally we see him pouring out a proliferation of related ideas (270, 313), revealing a fecundity of invention not normally associated with him. In one instance we can trace his thinking from the freehand pencil sketch to the finished pen and ink drawing (19, 23). From c. 1680 he began to make pen and ink sketches, but these served a slightly different purpose and will be discussed below.
Wren's presentation drawings fall into two distinct groups: drawings of the 1660s, when he was still employed in Oxford, and drawings of the 1670s, following the move to London. The drawings from the first of these periods include designs for the Sheldonian Theatre (1, 2), the chapel screen at All Souls (3), Whitehall Palace (264, 265, 268, 269), Trinity College, Oxford (9–12), Old St Paul's Cathedral (45–49), and Emmanuel College, Cambridge (8). These are highly finished drawings, executed on large sheets of superior-quality paper and attractively shaded with coloured washes (2, 8, 46, 47). His early pen and ink technique is characterised by great delicacy, with finely spun lines of breathtaking skill and freehand detail cautiously executed with dotted lines. The brightly coloured washes differentiate the various building materials (grey for stone, red for brick, blue for leaded roofs, yellow for gilded features). His under-drawing technique at this period is pragmatic; unshaded drawings are set out with a scoring implement (1, 3, 264, 268, 269, 395), while washed drawings include a combination of scored and pencil under-drawing (9–12, 45–49, 265). His finest drawings of the 1660s show the pre-fire design for St Paul's (45–49), which he produced over the summer of 1666. 'I shall not repent the great satisfaction and pleasure I have taken in the contrivance,' he informed Dean Sancroft, 'which aequalls that of poetry or composition in Musick.'[14] They include moments of high virtuosity, such as the narrow band of red shading on the compasses on 45 and 48 (which is less than half a millimetre across) and the narrow strip of blue lead along the ridge-line of the nave and choir in 47, which reveals a similar degree of control. Several drawings from this period are signed and dated (9–12, 305), perhaps indicative of a newfound pride.
Wren's drawing technique underwent a sudden transformation after his appointment as Surveyor-General. The presentation designs of the 1670s are characterised by an intense precision, first encountered in a preliminary elevation for St Magnus-the-Martyr, datable to c. 1671 (121). His ruled line has become thicker and inkier, while his freehand detail is more confidently rendered than previously, with smooth, continuous lines. Every feature of the design was carefully rehearsed in the pencil under-drawing, and his depiction of capitals, swags, vases, etc. is as controlled and impersonal as his ruled line. The designs are set out with straight lines ruled in pencil and segmental lines scored into the page with a pair of dividers. The wash shading is more intensely modelled than formerly, with shadows cast across the designs; this, rather than colour coding, is its raison d'être. The ruled scale-bars are strictly functional.
Wren produced a remarkable series of presentation drawings c. 1675, his annus mirabilis as a draughtsman. These include drawings for a Commencement House in Cambridge (15–18 the preliminary and executed designs for Trinity College Library (23–26, 29–31), the Warrant design for St Paul's (71–75), and the chapel reredos at Whitehall Palace (256). Other drawings can be assigned to this period on the basis of draughtsmanship alone (312, 402, 403). Wren's drawing style reflects the greater austerity of the designs expressed, which include less surface ornament than his projects of the 1660s.
By the mid-1670s we can see a clear distinction between drawings made for presentation and drawings made for construction. Wren alluded to this distinction in his famous letter to Trinity College, Cambridge, in which he requested the return of his drawings, promising to send up working drawings instead:
I suppose you have good masons, how ever I would willingly take a farther paines to give all the mouldings in great, wee are scrupulous in small matters & you must pardon us, the Architects are as great pedants as Criticks or Heralds. And therefore if you approve the designes, let the mason take his measures as much as is necessary for the present setting out of the worke & be pleased to transmit them to me again & I shall copy out partes of them at large, more proper for the use of the workemen.[15]
The letter describes the presentation drawings sent up to Cambridge (29–31), while the drawings 'more proper for the use of the workemen' can be identified as 32-33. The latter, from which duplicates must have been taken, are drawn to a larger scale, with the design clearly expressed exclusively in terms of line. Other drawings of this kind are preserved in the collection (406, 123, 130, 132). Most of them date from the mid-1670s, and it seems likely that Wren developed this technique in response to his work at St Paul's Cathedral, where construction was begun in 1675[16]. By the mid-1670s, then, Wren had developed a series of distinct drawing types: the exploratory drawing, the presentation drawing, and the construction drawing. In each case the function of the drawing determined the method of architectural representation.
Drawing was therefore central to Wren's practice. From the outset of his time in London, however, he relied upon Edward Woodroofe as a draughtsman[17]. Woodroofe, as we have seen, held posts in the St Paul's and City church offices. A mason by trade, his origins are poorly documented. He was possibly the 'Mr Woodroofe' employed as a draughtsman by Sir William Dugdale in 1655[18], and probably the 'Mr. Woodrooffe Mason' employed in the interregnum Office of Works c. 1658. He probably first encountered Wren at St Paul's in 1668, and his hand can be seen in a design for the new cathedral datable to that year (51). His duties as a draughtsman are frequently mentioned in the cathedral works accounts thereafter, and many drawings for St Paul's can be confidently attributed to him (52–54, 56–58, 62–68, 69–70)[19]. His activities in the City church office are less well documented, but a handful of drawings (at All Souls and elsewhere) can nevertheless be attributed to him (116, 118, 119, 120, 135). His hand can also be discerned in designs for the universities (14), the royal palaces (243, 306, 307, 309), and elsewhere (399), evidence that he acted as Wren's draughtsman beyond the official sphere of his responsibilities. His draughtsmanship is easily distinguished from Wren's more assured drawing style. The line is much thicker, while the ink is much darker. His depiction of architectural detail is especially distinctive: his Corinthian capitals include lobe-like acanthus leaves, while his balusters are crudely rendered as circles suspended from dashes. The most distinctive feature of his hand is the use of ruled parallel hatching (51, 52–53, 116), a technique he modelled on the graphic conventions of French architectural engraving, examples of which were in his library. His plans are often shaded with a dark black wash (116, 243), a technique Wren subsequently adopted (71, 312). Although capable of architectural invention, Woodroofe's role in Wren's office was entirely subordinate. The physical evidence of his drawings shows them to have been set out by Wren, who, having summarised the design in pencil (what Roger Pratt called 'drawing dead'), passed them over to Woodroofe to be completed in pen and ink. This layered drawing technique reveals something of the dialogue between the architect and his draughtsman.
Woodroofe died in November 1675, depriving Wren of a much relied-on colleague. He was succeeded in the City church and St Paul's offices by John Oliver, a surveyor by profession and a glazier by trade. Hooke saw Oliver 'paint glasse' on 9 December 1673[20], and we know he owned drawings by Inigo Jones[21]. We might assume from this that Oliver could draw, but his hand has never been identified, and it is probably significant that his arrival in Wren's office coincided with the employment of a new draughtsman. This was Thomas Laine, a young painter–stainer recently out of articles, who received regular payments (totalling £82 10s.) 'for copying the Designes of severall Churches' between 1677 and 1682[22]. A group of drawings, clearly the work of a single draughtsman and all depicting churches begun at this time, can be assigned to him (124, 131, 133, 134, 138, 139–142, 143, 144, 145-146). His attractive drawing style is characterised by extensive pencil under-drawing, the confident depiction of architectural detail, and the elegant use of grey wash. His drawings for St Clement Danes are especially fine (139–142). Drawings located elsewhere confirm that he was engaged to copy existing drawings by Wren[23], and there is no reason to suppose he designed any of what he drew. He was also responsible for three drawings of an unidentified country house (315–317). He disappears without trace in 1682.
A handful of drawings at All Souls can be attributed to Robert Hooke (125–129, 135–137, 400). Hooke's drawing style, however, was never consistent, and his duties within Wren's office have been greatly exaggerated in recent years. His role was limited to the City Churches, and he never held posts in the Office of Works or at St Paul's (although there is evidence he coveted them)[24]. Where the Monument was concerned, Hooke and Wren were acting for different parties, Hooke for the City, Wren for the king. Hooke's role in the office has been further confused by the conflation of his drawing style with that of Edward Pierce (see 112).
As the 1670s gave way to the 1680s, Wren's hand begins to fade out of view. In 1678 he made the presentation drawings for the Charles I Mausoleum at Windsor (293–295), and c. 1682–83 he produced the early drawings for Winchester Palace (291–292). Many others from this period must be lost (those for Chelsea Hospital, for example, have completely disappeared)[25]. We can nevertheless be sure that Wren gradually stopped making finished drawings in the 1680s. Instead, he began to produce a new kind of drawing: the freehand pen and ink sketch. Examples of this technique include a plan for St Paul's c. 1685–87 (79), two sketch elevations for the Queen's Privy Lodgings at Whitehall Palace (262), a preliminary elevation for a church in Lincoln's Inn's Fields (155), and two unidentified designs datable to this period on the basis of draughtsmanship alone (320, 410)[26]. Why he stopped making finished drawings has never been adequately explained. Perhaps he was no longer inclined. Or perhaps, as he entered his fifth decade, his eyes began to fail him. The most likely explanation, however, is the arrival in London of Nicholas Hawksmoor, who, in spite of unpromising beginnings, was to transform Wren's office practice.
Hawksmoor can be documented in the office from January 1684[27]. In the years immediately before this he had travelled extensively in England, making topographical drawings as he went. According to Vertue, writing in 1731, he 'came to London, became clerk to Sr. Christopher Wren & thence became an Architect', and this is essentially what happened. His signature regularly appears in the City church accounts from May 1684, and in 1686 he succeeded Andrew Philips as Wren's personal clerk. After this date his handwriting becomes increasingly fluent, and it was at about this time that he started drawing for Wren. The development of his draughtsmanship can be traced through about 120 drawings in the collection. To do so is to witness – as Wren must have done – the unfolding of an extraordinary facility.
The earliest drawing in his hand in the collection is probably a half elevation of Thoresby House in Nottinghamshire (318), which is similar in style and technique to his record drawing of Nottingham Castle, made a few years previously. The Thoresby drawing is annotated (as so many of Hawksmoor's drawings are), but the handwriting is comparatively unformed. Other examples of his early handwriting occur on 34, 148, 150, 260, 343, and 411. He quickly developed an aptitude for technical drawing, and his drawings of the mid-1680s can be divided into two categories: pencil preparatory drawings and highly finished presentation drawings.
His preparatory drawings were executed with finely sharpened graphite. The earliest examples relate to St Paul's Cathedral (83, 84, 86), where he played a crucial role in the revision of the design undertaken c. 1685–87[28]. This category of drawing is unique to Hawksmoor. Wren had adopted a similar technique as part of his preparatory drawing method. Hawksmoor, however, had developed an intermediary category of drawing in which the design is assembled and finalised to scale in pencil. He continued to make drawings of this kind throughout the 1690s and beyond: at Greenwich from 1693 (189, 193, 195), for the choir fittings at St Paul's c. 1694 (94–96, 101, 102–103), and at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in 1701 (157).
Hawksmoor's early presentation drawings are less obviously from his hand. The draughtsmanship is controlled and tight, similar in appearance (if not in technique) to Wren's presentation drawings of the 1670s. The designs are extensively set out with a scoring implement, drawn with a fine, delicate line, and intensely shaded with grey and (occasionally) blue washes, with strong, diagonally cast shadows. Examples include a drawing of the Privy Gallery range at Whitehall, made c. 1685 (257), a preliminary design for Easton Neston, made c. 1686 (321), and an undated design for an unidentified country house (319). This phase in Hawksmoor's career culminates in the drawings for the revised designs for St Paul's (81–82), which have a precision and degree of finish that he never aspired to again. He first introduced his characteristic scale-bars at this time, which are figured in his attractive handwriting. One telling feature, recently noted by Higgott, is his use of dots and chevrons (86, 257, 261) to mark off the 10 ft subdivisions. The scales are occasionally set within elaborate banners (151, 412).
In the years around 1690 Hawksmoor adopted a technique of ruled parallel hatching, no doubt inspired by engraving and (perhaps) the precedent of Woodroofe. Several of the preparatory schemes for Hampton Court exemplify this technique (206, 208), and other drawings datable to this period are 80, 91, 322, 324 and 328–331. After 1689 he stopped setting out his designs with a scoring implement, favouring an exclusively pencil technique instead. The pen and ink drawing above becomes increasingly imprecise, with right angles rarely meeting as such and moulding profiles loosely rendered in free hand. His Corinthian and Composite capitals become light and airy. The effect of this imprecision is not unattractive, however. Rather, it is elegantly stylised. The likeliest explanation for this tendency is haste: the style of the drawings suggests they were produced very quickly (which no doubt proved useful). Examples from this period include designs for Christ's Hospital (426–429), Trinity College Chapel, Oxford (42), and Northolt Rectory in Middlesex (332). Several of his plans from this phase include pencil dimensions in a small, untidy hand (210, 211, 333, 335). His freehand drawing at this period is often shaded with loose hatching (37, 38).
In the mid-1690s Hawksmoor developed a new type of drawing, the wash sketch, in which he dispensed with pen and ink outline and expressed the designs by means of pencil and wash shading. The massing of the designs is thereby emphasised, and their sculptural quality is miraculously conjured up before our eyes (96, 153, 154, 257, 300). In the Whitehall Palace drawings of 1698 we see the more remote parts of the design looming ghost-like in the distance, ingeniously conveying a sense of recession within what is still an orthogonal mode of representation. At the same time he began to introduce elements of perspective. Wren may have invented a perspectograph (382) and advocated that 'the architect ought, above all Things […] be well skilled in Perspective'[29], but he seldom made perspective drawings (although two notable exceptions, 254 and 264, show that he could when he wanted to). In the early 1690s, however, we find Hawksmoor introducing elements of perspective into otherwise orthogonal drawings (82, 90, 94, 95, 101, 201, 231), and in one remarkable instance we see him combining his wash sketch technique with a fully perspectival mode of representation (166). These techniques parallel the changing nature of the designs themselves. The appearance of Andrea Pozzo's Perspectiva in 1693 may have been a factor. Hawksmoor was subsequently to endorse this work[30].
Wren's hand, as we have seen, largely disappears from the collection in the 1680s (although he remains present in the administrative records until his retirement in 1718). To assume that he ceased designing, however, would be to misunderstand the nature of drawing as evidence. It is certainly true that Hawksmoor's drawings imply a greater degree of autonomy than Woodroofe's or Laine's. What this tells us, however, is that Wren used Hawksmoor in a different way. Whereas Wren communicated his designs to Woodroofe by working up the early stages of the drawing, he conveyed his ideas to Hawksmoor by a more relaxed method. If we look at Wren's ink sketches of the 1680s (262, 410), we often see pencil annotations by Wren and Hawksmoor, implying that the latter subsequently redrew them as finished presentation drawings. In working up sketches of this kind, Hawksmoor was necessarily given a freer rein to finalise the detail; hence (perhaps) the changing nature of the architectural ornament produced in Wren's office in the 1690s. Wren, however, retained ultimate control. He alone assumed responsibility (and recognition) for the designs produced in the office, and it is surely telling that in at least one instance Hawksmoor nominally relinquished his (presumed) authorship of a design to Wren (428). Hawksmoor's hand largely disappears from the collection after 1700.
The last of Wren's draughtsman was William Dickinson, who can be documented in the office from July 1691, when, aged about twenty, he began witnessing payments in the City church accounts[31]. In 1696 he was appointed Clerk of the Works at Greenwich Palace, and in the same year he began assisting John Oliver as a measurer at St Paul's[32]. In the following year he succeeded Hawksmoor as clerk to the City church office. His hand first appears in the drawings for St James's Palace in 1703 (246–249), and then again in 1704–05 at the House of Lords (345–348). Most of his drawings relate to the Westminster area, where from 1699 he assisted Wren at the Abbey, and where from 1711 he occupied the posts of College Surveyor and Under-Surveyor to the Abbey. In 1713–15 he was clerk of the works at Whitehall, Westminster, and St James's palaces. His drawing style was clearly modelled on that of Hawksmoor, who no doubt taught him to draw[33]. The quality of his draughtsmanship, however, is notably inferior. From c. 1706 he regularly signed and dated his drawings, and the development of his hand is most conveniently followed in the Westminster dormitory designs of 1711–22 (370–381). The rejection of Dickinson's dormitory designs symbolises the eclipse of Wren's influence. Wren was dismissed as Surveyor-General in 1718, bringing the history of his office to a close.
Footnotes:
5. Summerson 1990a, 66. See also Summerson 1953, 23, 30, 34, 38. [return ↑]
6. Wren 1750, 182–85, 198, 210. [return ↑]
7. HKW 5, 443–51. [return ↑]
8. <GL, MS CF box 54/5, XVII; Higgott 2004a, 187. [return ↑]
9. Campbell and Bowles 2004. [return ↑]
10. GL, MS 25540/1, fols. 1–2; Jeffery 1996, 31–41. [return ↑]
11. Colvin 1995, 1086. [return ↑]
12. WS 19, 103. [return ↑]
13. McKitterick 1995, 143–45.1 [return ↑]
14. WS 11, 74. [return ↑]
15. McKitterick 1995, 143–45. [return ↑]
16. Higgott 2004b, 21, where autograph drawings of this kind in the St Paul's collection are listed. [return ↑]
17. See Geraghty 2001, where Woodroofe's career is outlined and his drawing style described. [return ↑]
18. Roberts 2002, 118. [return ↑]
19. See also Geraghty 2001, 479, and Higgott 2004b, 537, n. 19. [return ↑]
20. Hooke 1935, 74. [return ↑]
21. Harris and Higgott 1989, 22. [return ↑]
22. For Laine, see Geraghty 1999. [return ↑]
23. Geraghty 1999, 242–44, nos. 2–3. [return ↑]
24. Hooke 1935, 38 (8 April 1673), 160–61 (15 May 1675). [return ↑]
25. See Ascoli 1975, where the absence of drawings for Chelsea is convincingly accounted for. [return ↑]
26. For examples in other collections, see: WS 18, pl. 8 (R); WS 3, pl. 27 (R); Sladen 2004, fig. 164; Oswald 1948, fig. 4. [return ↑]
27. Downes 1969, 17; Geraghty 2000, 1–2. [return ↑]
28. See Higgott 2004b. [return ↑]
30. Harris 1990, 373. [return ↑]
31. Geraghty 2000, 6. [return ↑]
32. Colvin 1995, 302–03. [return ↑]
33. The same is likewise true of his handwriting. See the inscription on cat. no. 248, which is indistinguishable from Hawksmoor's hand. [return ↑]